11 famous executives who majored in philosophy

Icahn is the chairman of Icahn Enterprises and is one of the most well-known and aggressive activist investors of our time, buying and eventually folding Trans World Airlines, and more recently cashing in big on Netflix.

His philosophy thesis for his 1957 degree was titled "The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning," reported the New York Times. He also went to New York University's Medical School, but dropped out without graduating.

Until the summer of 2011, Bair served as the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, having been appointed by George W. Bush in 2005. Since then, she's written the non-fictional "Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself," and a fictional YA novel on the same topic, "The Bullies of Wall Street." This spring, she was appointed president of Washington College.

Bair received her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Kansas and later got a J.D. from the same school.

Soros, the chairman of Soros Fund Management, is one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time. He's particularly well known for a 1992 bet against the pound, the Atlantic explains, which earned him the nickname "the man who broke the Bank Of England."

In college while studying under renowned philosopher Karl Popper — his work "made a profound impression on me," he told the Financial Times — Soros worked as a house painter and an apple picker to pay his tuition, Salon reports.

Allison Jr. rose through the ranks at Merrill Lynch, eventually becoming its chief operating officer. He left the company in mid-1999 and went on to serve as CEO of Fannie Mae and to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief program.

He earned a B.A. in philosophy from Yale, served four years in the Navy, and then got his MBA from Stanford.

Levin joined Time Inc.'s HBO in the 1970s and helped develop the business model that made HBO a huge success. He later engineered the merger with Warner Carner that turned the company into a true media giant. He became CEO in the early '90s. However, his tenure ended less positively with a disastrous merger with AOL, which he called "the worst deal of the century" during a CNBC spot.

As a philosophy major at Haverford College, Levin studied the continuity between Jewish and Christian theology, reports Slate.

Byrne almost made philosophy his career. After getting an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth in Chinese studies, he went on to get a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford.

Ultimately, though, Byrne decided to pursue a career in business — bolstered in part, perhaps, by his longtime relationship with his "Dutch uncle" Warren Buffett, Wired notes. Byrne helped found Overstock in 1999, took over as CEO the same year, and took it public in 2002.

Butterfield founded Flickr with his then-wife Caterina Fake in 2004, after a stroke of genius: "I've got a great idea," he recalled telling Fake in Inc. "Let's make a photo-sharing site." About a year later, Yahoo snapped it up for $35 million. Now, Butterfield has a new project: he's the CEO of Slack, a workplace communication tool valued at $2.8 billion.

According to LinkedIn, both his undergraduate degree from the University of Victoria and his Master's from Cambridge were in philosophy, focusing on the philosophy of the mind.

Thiel is a cofounder and former CEO of PayPal, and the cofounder and chairman of the software company Palantir. He currently serves as president of Clarium Capital and as a managing partner at venture capital firm the Founder's Fund. He was also the first outside investor in Facebook, reminds CNN.

Despite his well-publicized criticism of higher education, Thiel got his undergraduate degree in 20th century philosophy at Stanford in 1989, and a law degree in 1992, reports the New York Times. His pronounced libertarian streak came out at the school, and he co-founded the conservative/libertarian Stanford Review newspaper in 1987.

"My original plan was to become an academic," the entrepreneur and venture capitalist told Wired, and Hoffman was on track to make it happen: after graduating from Stanford with a degree in Symbolic Systems, he won a Marshall Scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford. "What I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture — I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be."

Frustrated by the pace and impact of academic work — "it didn't have enough scale," he told Wired — he changed directions and became a software entrepreneur. After working with his Stanford friends (including Peter Theil) at PayPal, he launched LinkedIn in 2003.

A "smart kid" with a penchant for playing weiqi (a chess-like game), Chen was born into a family that valued the liberal arts — so much so that her early talents in math and science were initially overlooked, according to Forbes.

As an undergrad, she majored in philosophy, and while she eventually went on to get an MBA and a masters of information systems — both from the University of Texas — Forbes once speculated that her non-technical background might be her greatest asset leading the global security software company. "I am not that kind of CEO, who puts up a poker face and pretends to know everything," she said, adding that she's " just never afraid of raising stupid questions."